For the Love of Jaguars

Jaguars have captured the imagination of humans since ancient times, but face extinction in the modern day. Alan Rabinowitz, co-founder of Panthera, and dubbed the "Indiana Jones of wildlife protection" by Time magazine, spent years seeking out these mysterious animals in order to protect them. This excerpt is from his presentation at National Geographic's Grosvenor Auditorium, November 14, 2014.

Editor's Note: Alan Rabinowitz died August 5th, 2018, after battling leukemia for 17 years.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Thank you for coming out tonight. It's a great group. And let's take a step into my most favorite world, away from the world of human beings, into the world of the jaguar. I've been working on big cats and other species for over 30 years. But nothing in the tropical jungles has ever made my hair stand on end like one particular sound. This is the guttural growl of the jaguar. This is saying stay away. You've wandered too close. I've heard that sound five times in my life. And it's never gotten any easier.

The oldest jaguar we have on record is that of the European jaguar. In reaction to the Pleistocene ice ages started doing what we now know is a true characteristic of jaguars. In response to adversity, in response to environmental perturbations the jaguar moves. And it moves, and it moves. Traveling thousands of miles eventually throughout the Pleistocene scattering in all directions. Now by the mid-Pleistocene the European jaguar went extinct.

The earliest evidence we have of early man and jaguars together comes about 4,000 to 11,000 years ago where skeletons of early man and jaguars are found in the same place. In a cave in Texas called Schultz Cave. There were at least 12 civilizations going from Mexico into South America, but one of the earliest civilizations, and where what I call the Jaguar Cultural Corridor was born was among a group of people called the Olmec. One author who studied them called them jaguar psychotics. What the Olmec did, they actually would deform the heads of their babies in order to make them look more like cats. They believed that children born with Down Syndrome weren't anomalies they were almost God-like. They believed that Down Syndromes children looked like those cats. And were a cross between a female, a human female mating with a male jaguar.

Following the Olmecs, the Maya carried jaguar iconography to new heights. Always depicting jaguars never as just an animal, always as something more. Not just animal-human but beyond that. Jaguars controlled the world that the humans couldn't control. And if people wanted to control the wild they had to somehow do it through jaguars, become one with the jaguar. This was taken to its heights with jaguar shamans. And one of the things that the jaguar shamans always sought to get, to absorb were the eyes of the jaguar. The eyes of a jaguar were believed to be able to see into the spirit world. Jaguars guarded the underworld, jaguars were a link to the spirit world. The modern day Maya still believe if you wanted to see ghosts, you-- animals can see ghosts, you go and take tears from an animal, rub your finger in an animal's eyes and then rub it on your eyes, it's one of the most unhealthy practices in the world and you can see, see ghosts.

Now all of this came to an abrupt end in the 15th century when the Spanish and Portuguese colonists came and conquered the New World. Now what the Spanish also brought with them were just big, dumb hunks of meat on a platter... cattle. And their version of cattle management was to allow large numbers of cattle to free range into wild areas. The jaguar had no idea what this animal was other than a big chunk of meat that stood there as the jaguar swatted it and knocked it down. So, what happened, jaguars were not seen as semi-deities now anymore. They were seen as vermin, seen as pests. And the only way to get rid of them was to kill them. And you value them as trophies.

What really happened, which almost destroyed the jaguar was the fashion industry. In the 1960's, interestingly in the 1960's Jackie Kennedy came out wearing a leopard skin coat. In fact the man who created it for her, Oleg Cassini later said it was one of the worst things he ever did in his life. Because he had no idea what it would lead to. That spurred a fashion industry of spotted cat coats. Jaguars were becoming wiped out, as well as other spotted cats. That's a real leopard skin around that dog by the way. What happened with this terrible trade in spotted cat coats is that all the governments started to set up new protected areas, started passing new laws, started banning jaguar hunting, trade in jaguar skins. So this was good but now the jaguar had to come back.

Okay, then a little boy named Alan steps into the scene who knew nothing about what was happening with the jaguars and other spotted cats. I was a young man but I had been born with a debilitating stutter. A really horrible stutter to where I couldn't speak. It was called, by the people at the time it was called “frozen mouth.” They didn't know what to do with me in the New York City school systems, they put me into special classes. They didn't know about dyslexia or ADHD or many things. I just shut down. So I didn't talk to any adults, which made them think I was even more disturbed. But what I could do is I could talk to animals. I still stuttered, now we know stuttering is not purely psychological, it's genetic. But I still stuttered but I could, I could express myself, there was no expectation, no judging, no speed-up, slow-down, no calm down or finishing words for me, or anything like that. So, I could-- they became my life, they became my friends. And when I had bad weeks at school, and there were many, because back then there weren't these things against bullying and I was in a lot of fights. And I was always in the principal's office.

When there was a really bad day at school or a bad week, my father would take me to the Bronx Zoo. And my favorite place at the Bronx Zoo was what I called the Big Cat House. Cage after cage after cage, concrete cage of lions, tigers, one lone jaguar. And I knew as a kid, it was really obvious to me as a kid, here these really big, strong, healthy, normal animals and they're locked inside these jails, inside these cages, by human beings who they could kill instantly. And the reason was because they didn't have a voice. They didn't have a human voice. Imagine even today if animals had a human voice how we would treat them. How many animals would we keep even in our nice zoos, nice enclosures, if they actually said, “Please, I don't want to be here.” Or, “Look, please, stop feeding me that same food you're feeding me, it's really terrible.” How would we treat animals if-- and that's the only difference. They can speak, they communicate, we all know that. But they don't have a human voice. They were me, I was them. They became my haven.

There was one lone jaguar. This is a picture from my children's book. And I would always spend time with that lone jaguar because that jaguar, while all the other cats charged and growled and made vocalizations, that jaguar sat back, and just watched people as if the people were in a cage and it was in charge. And I would stand there and talk to it. And I would promise that jaguar and I had no idea what I was promising. I was a very young child I had no idea what there was in the greater world. All I knew was my world was horrible. And I would promise him if I ever got a voice I would be the voice for the animals. Now I had no idea what that meant. And it wasn't even about the jaguars as much as it was about me. But I did make that promise every single time I stood by the jaguar's cage or the tiger's cage. And I never forgot that promise.

Fast forward 20-- how many years, I was about seven. Fast forward about 15 years or so in the future, went to graduate school, studied eco-- new courses called ecology and animal ecology, wildlife biology, and I meet my mentor George Schaller. I end up being sent by George Schaller to this newly independent country called Belize in 1981. In order to try to see why there are jaguars being actually hit on the one dirt road through the entire country. Then when that worked out he said, “Would you like to go back for a few years and actually try to capture them, study them, radio-collar them? Do what nobody has ever done in the rainforest habitat.” And I said, “Absolutely.” I had no idea how I'd catch jaguars. I had no idea at first where even Belize was when he first told me. So I went down.

Now catching jaguars wasn't easy. I didn't know how at first. The first time I built wooden traps two-by-fours, I actually caught a black jaguar. It chewed and busted out of my two-by-four traps. Later I learnt from the Mennonites how to build an iron rebar trap. I captured jaguars, radio-collared them, learned how to drug, back then we didn't have vets showing us any of this, which wasn't good. It was very hit or miss. I mean, I used safe drugs but jaguars weren't always fully asleep. This was difficult, it was dangerous and it was great. It was my life. This was what I was meant for. One of the things which I noticed right away, in the early days is how jaguars have a voice. How they do talk, they communicate with incredible amounts of different signals, scratches, scrapes, fecal deposits, urine, feces in the scrape, urine in the scrape, feces next to the scrape, they have a whole language of how they communicate.

And I could see jaguars probably have the most powerful jaws of any cat in the world. Now that's been proven that jaguars per pound of animal have the strongest jaws of any cat in the world, along with Clouded Leopards. These are massively muscled, powerful jaws. But the most incredible thing is what they do with that. Jaguars kill unlike any other cat. All the other big cats go for the soft, soft tissue, go for the throat, go for the underbelly. Jaguars never do, unless they miss. Jaguars go for the skull. Jaguars go for bone. If it's small enough they will get its skull and puncture the canines into the skull. If it's too big, like a 2,000-pound bull, it goes for the spinal vertebrae. And punctures those canines into the vertebrae and snaps its neck. Takes animals down quick. It's a vicious, quick killer.

Eventually what I was to realize, the European jaguar that had gone extinct had never gone extinct. It had morphed. It had travelled over into the New World. And the jaguar of the Pleistocene, bigger, stronger had morphed into to a smaller, more efficient predator. Short limbs, low to the ground, low center of gravity, this animal capable of eating anything and everything, capable of taking down prey with a single bite or chewing gently on a small bird or an armadillo. Its size was perfect. Its structure was perfect, I asked George Schaller and the New York Zoological Society if I could stay longer and I set up the world's first Jaguar Preserve, which ended being through no design of mine the first of all of the reserves in Belize, which is now their number one economic import. But the most important thing was this could give jobs to the Mayans who had been killing jaguars, now they were employed to protect jaguar. By the end of the 20th century the Jaguar Preserve had taken off. Eco-tourism was booming but it didn't seem to relate to the jaguar. The way people treated jaguars and other animals, the way people viewed them was still as a recreational outlet. Maybe they didn't kill them, so we played with them instead.

In 1999, I called together all the world's jaguar experts at a meeting in Mexico. The point was, it wasn't many, it was less than 25 people. The point was to try to get all the knowledge of what we knew about jaguars. Where did jaguars live to our knowledge at that time? In 1999 we were able to determine about 51 what's called JCUs, Jaguar Conservation Units. Places where we knew jaguars lived and bred. By later in 2000 it went up to almost a 100. The point was to do triage. That was the word of the time. Let's take limited funding and figure out what we can save in different kinds of habitat types. So save just the highest priority jaguar populations in different kinds of systems. That seemed great. At this meeting there were a group of geneticists. We were gonna use DNA and figure out how many races of jaguar there really were. Last line of their abstract, which set me back on my heels was that they said, “There is genetic flow between jaguar populations.” That blew me away. I'm not even sure they knew what they were saying. What that meant... they were not able to find any races of jaguars. None. None. The jaguar that roamed in Northern Mexico up to the Southwest US, was the same jaguar as that in the neotropics of Central America, was the same jaguar as the 300-pound animal of the Pantanal in Brazil. There was no other large carnivore in the world, still is not... where there is no individual races of that animal which has been defined through genetics. What it meant is that these places where we thought were outside of jaguar range it was all important. Forget triage this was the animal of the Pleistocene, when faced with any kind of adversity, it moves. It moves until it finds what it has to find to survive.

This was the beginning of what we call the Jaguar Corridor Initiative. We were working on the premise that 50 percent of historic jaguar range was gone. But the permeability model showed that over 80 percent of jaguar range, while jaguars might not be able to live through all of it, can actually move through 80 percent of their historic range. Still in this day we're working on 4.5 million square kilometers. That's what has to be saved to save the jaguar. So we trained local people on how to do interview surveys. We trained local teams on how to set up camera traps. We trained ranchers and farmers on how to, how to identify and pick up and collect jaguar feces. And we trained dogs, usually drug sniffing dogs on how to only sniff out jaguar feces. Sometimes they mess up and it will be some other feces, but usually only jaguar feces.

Then came all the hard part. Fifteen years in the making. Country by country, we would go and do the genetic research, it would show us that the corridor did exist. Now this is an interesting thing. Our model ended up showing us breaks in the corridor, based on what we knew about jaguars. Yet the genetics would say that there's no breaks. Somehow jaguars are getting across. One of the most interesting areas was that right north of San Pedro de Sula in Honduras. And if most of you read the newspapers, you'll know that that's the murder capital of the world because of drugs. Now that showed up as a break in the jaguar corridor. But yet the genetics said it wasn't. So I hopped on a plane and went to San Pedro de Sula. And it turns out that right outside of the town of this city, there is a low mountain range. And that mountain range is where the drug labs are. It's where murders happen. Local people don't go up in there. They're afraid they'd get killed. We spoke to some local people, we got the permission, they accompanied us and we went up in there. And there are jaguars roaming through there. The jaguars can take advantage of that kind of thing. So these small patches, which we would have ignored and would've gotten completely cut down are now part of the jaguar corridor and they're part of what we're trying to protect. Once we have the corridor definitely mapped out of where jaguars truly are walking and we can prove it, we then go to the government. Once it gets signed into law that means it's in the country's computer system. Anybody wanting to do the development in the country, having to do an environmental impact statement, it then pops up if it's coming through the jaguar corridor.

I assumed like many do that the jaguar cultural corridor was dead and gone long ago. In 2011, UNESCO declared jaguar shamanism to be one of the most endangered cultural traditions soon to be gone. Now that's true, looking at what used to be but as I also learned, about the jaguar, what the animal was capable of, so I also learned that the jaguar cultural corridor had not disappeared, it wasn't dead. Jaguars are still parts of ceremony, jaguar culture is still taught now to school children, they've never gone away. But what has been so interesting, there are many places where the jaguars don't exist anymore, where they are gone. The Mayans had a saying that when a jaguar dies, a star is lost from the sky. In these places where the jaguar was gone, their sky was dark... very dark. They want jaguars back. But they're gone, usually forever.

We all have a voice but that voice has to be heard. All of us have to let our voice be heard, all living things. But for those who don't have the exact same voice as we do, we have to better learn to listen and to understand that voice. And only through that will we realize... how valuable other living things are. Not only to our own health and survival, but to the health and survival of the planet. You have to hear that voice. Thank you. Thank you.

For the Love of Jaguars

Jaguars have captured the imagination of humans since ancient times, but face extinction in the modern day. Alan Rabinowitz, co-founder of Panthera, and dubbed the "Indiana Jones of wildlife protection" by Time magazine, spent years seeking out these mysterious animals in order to protect them. This excerpt is from his presentation at National Geographic's Grosvenor Auditorium, November 14, 2014.

Editor's Note: Alan Rabinowitz died August 5th, 2018, after battling leukemia for 17 years.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.